Television Drama and the People’s War: David Hare’s Licking Hitler, Ian McEwan’s The Imitation Game, and Trevor Griffiths’s Country

Abstract

It is now fifteen years since Angus Calder first published his influential history, The People’s War: Britain 1939–45. In his preface, Calder summed up succintly and unequivocally what he saw as the significance of his researches:

The war was fought with the willing brains and hearts of the most vigorous element in the community, the educated, the skilled, the bold, the active, the young, who worked more and more consciously towards a transformed post-war world.

Thanks to their energy, the forces of wealth, bureaucracy and privilege survived with little inconvenience, recovered from their shock, and began to proceed with their old business of manoeuvre, concession, and studied betrayal.¹